Corporation says broadcasting of N-word by Tourette syndrome campaigner was ‘serious mistake’
The BBC is to undertake a fast-track investigation into the broadcasting of a racial slur aired during its coverage of the Bafta film awards, amid rising anger inside the corporation over the error.
Tourette syndrome campaigner John Davidson could be heard shouting the N-word as Sinners stars Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo presented the award for special visual effects at the Royal Festival Hall in London on Sunday.
Their unnerving songs about car crashes and suburban ennui, sung in a sparkling yet unemotional RP, stood out from the Britpop bloat. Now, thanks to a certain singer taking their streams stratospheric, the band are back
John Moore, the guitarist in Black Box Recorder, adopts a weary tone as he tells this story. “Our daughter said to us, ‘Have you heard of Billie Eilish?’” His response was not what she was expecting. “Yes,” he said. “She’s fucked up our retirement.” This spring, he, Luke Haines and vocalist Sarah Nixey (the mother of said daughter, though she and Moore are long separated) will return to the stage for the first time since 2009, in part thanks to their streaming numbers going stratospheric after Eilish posted videos of herself listening to their 1998 debut single Child Psychology.
The song, about a disruptive girl who has refused to speak, been expelled from school and fallen out with her family, is typical of Black Box Recorder’s obsession with psychological breakdown in a peculiarly English, often suburban and middle-class setting: stories related by Nixey in her sparkling yet deadpan vocals. It’s a mix that later broke Black Box Recorder into the UK Top 20 with 2000 single The Facts of Life, and produced three albums that still stand apart from the rest of British pop.
A newly revealed diplomatic cable calls on US diplomats to work against attempts by foreign nations to regulate how US tech companies handle their citizens’ data, as “data sovereignty initiatives” gather steam in Europe over security concerns.
More from Reuters:
President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered U.S. diplomats to lobby against attempts to regulate U.S. tech companies’ handling of foreigners’ data, saying in an internal diplomatic cable seen by Reuters that such efforts could interfere with artificial intelligence-related services.
Experts say the move signals the Trump administration is reverting to a more confrontational approach as some foreign countries seek limits around how Silicon Valley firms process and store their citizens’ personal information - initiatives often described as “data sovereignty” or “data localization.“
Bill Gates apologized to staff of his foundation for his ties to Jeffrey Epstein and admitted to two affairs but stated he did not participate in the convicted sex offender’s crimes, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
At a town hall on Tuesday, Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist, said it was a “huge mistake to spend time with Epstein” and to bring Gates Foundation executives to meetings with Epstein.
A record 129 journalists and media workers were killed in the course of their work in 2025, and two-thirds of them were killed by Israel, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has said.
It was the second straight year that killings set a record and the second straight year that Israel was responsible for two-thirds of them, the CPJ, a New York-based independent organisation that documents attacks on the press, said in its annual report.
I looked back to discover the untold story of how western intelligence was misread, even in Kyiv. The conclusion offers a stark warning for the future
Tuesday marked the fourth anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and at this time of year it’s hard not to recall memories of the morning of 24 February 2022, when the fate of Ukraine and the history of Europe were irrevocably changed by the decision of the man in the Kremlin.
Around 9pm the evening before, I had received a message from a colleague at another news outlet. It was an unequivocal warning from an intelligence source that the war would start that night. We discussed it among the Guardian’s Ukraine reporting team and international editors. My colleague Emma Graham-Harrison, who was on an overnight train from Kyiv towards the frontline city of Mariupol, decided she would get off halfway, in the middle of the night, and beg a spot on the first train heading back to Kyiv. It turned out to be a wise move: Mariupol was soon under siege and the scene of much of the worst carnage of the war. Emma remained in Kyiv, part of our team covering the initial Russian attack on the capital.
The Metropolitan police has apologised to the Commons speaker for giving Peter Mandelson’s lawyers information pointing to him as the source of a claim that the former UK ambassador planned to flee the country.
Senior Scotland Yard officers are also understood to be meeting in person with Lindsay Hoyle on Wednesday afternoon to explain their error, which is regarded internally as a serious breach of protocol.
‘These guys wanted to leave the chaos and fighting of a neo-Nazi skinhead band playing a school hall – and causing horror. “We’re using your car to count up the takings,” one told me. “As long as I can take a photo,” I said’
In 1990, I was working in photojournalism but doing music photography on the side to make money. At the time there was a rise in neo-Nazi music, with bands such as Skrewdriver and the Blood and Honour movement. I was initially going to do a magazine piece on it but it grew into a much bigger project and I ended up spending two years following these people around the country. It led to a book and a documentary.
It was a difficult project and there were moral and ethical challenges as well as dangerous ones, but that was part of the attraction. The people were suspicious of me but I was honest about what I wanted to do. They knew I didn’t agree with their politics but that I didn’t have an agenda.
Coalition government agrees to remove parts of controversial law and allow homes to rely on fossil fuels
Germany’s coalition government has been accused of abandoning its climate targets after agreeing to scrap parts of a contentious heating law mandating the use of renewables in favour of a draft law allowing homeowners to rely on fossil fuels.
While the previous law required most newly installed heating systems to use at least 65% renewable energy, often with a heat pump, the amended legislation will allow households to keep using oil and gas.
Hamas to almost certainly reject plan described in Israeli press, say experts, as no guarantee Israel will withdraw on surrender of weapons
Progress in the Gaza peace plan has stalled over disagreements on how Hamas should be disarmed, with Israel threatening to go back to full-scale war if the condition is not carried out quickly.
The second phase of the US-brokered ceasefire, which Washington declared had begun in January, was meant to involve Hamas disarming, Israeli forces withdrawing, and a Palestinian interim administration moving into Gaza backed by a Palestinian police force and an international stabilisation force (ISF).
The sex offender could exploit these masters of the universe because, despite their privilege, they still felt short-changed by life
One of the things that has been frequently puzzled over as the effluent of the Epstein story flows on, is how a college dropout who thought it was cool to do typos managed to persuade the world’s most powerful into his lair. What, precisely, was the nature of his “genius”? Was it blackmail? Was it the social pyramid scheme of using one big name to reel in another? Nothing has come close to explaining it until, with the latest crop of details from the Epstein files, something has become suddenly clear: that it wasn’t the trafficked girls and women who Jeffrey Epstein groomed. The man’s real talent, if we want to call it that, was in the grooming of his cohort of associates.
This isn’t to say, of course, that the men and occasional woman who threw in their lot with a man we must straight-facedly refer to as “the dead paedophile” weren’t culpable. Nonetheless, if you study the huge amount of Epstein-related material, from the New York Times’s deep dive into his finances to the vast cache of correspondence contained in the files, a picture emerges of a man who did the kind of number on his peers that you would more commonly see directed at victims. While multiple survivor testimonies indicate that Epstein regarded the girls and women he trafficked as of such low consequence he didn’t even need to bother to groom them – per Virginia Giuffre’s account, Epstein raped her the first time they met – all of his resources, via a variety of tactics, went into capturing the allegiances of powerful men.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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Goalhanger’s Tony Pastor says Serie A has ‘disappeared’
‘You have to embrace this idea of fragmentation’
Football “has eaten almost every sport worldwide” thanks to its dominance of TV and digital markets, according to the head of the leading podcast production company Goalhanger.
Tony Pastor, CEO of the studio behind the Rest is Football among other podcasts, said that broadcasters were struggling to get value for money for sports rights and that competitions should “embrace fragmentation” to reach audiences where they are.
Advocates often assume communities of color just don’t know any better when it comes to eating healthy
I met the man I’ll call Randy Johnson 13 years ago, as I began research in South Central Los Angeles. I’m an anthropologist who explores how people think about food and use food in their everyday lives. As executive director of a large food justice organization focused on K-12 education throughout the city, Randy was a key source. He talked to me about South Central’s status as a food desert, where its majority Latinx and Black residents had little access to groceries or healthy food. A middle-aged white man, Randy told me of his work in South Central, which centered around encouraging school-age children to eat more fresh vegetables.
He described South Central as a wasteland of sorts. “There is just nothing there,” he said, pointing to the common but false idea that there were no grocery stores there. He then pivoted to talking about the residents. “I see them having almost zero education when it comes to [making healthy eating choices]. They don’t know that what they’re eating is destroying them slowly. It’s just that we, as a society, have failed our citizens to educate them that they shouldn’t be buying the fries every day.”
Hanna Garth is assistant professor of anthropology at Princeton University
The director of Finding Nemo and Wall-E has made an ambitious yet entirely baffling mess with the help of Rashida Jones and Kate McKinnon
In the first few minutes of In the Blink of an Eye, director Andrew Stanton’s long-gestating, epoch-spanning sci-fi epic, a Neanderthal man (Jorge Vargas) explores a perilously rocky beach 45,000 years ago. For some reason, he decides to climb one of the larger, steeper rocks – for food? For a view? But he loses his grip and falls backward, landing on the sharp stones below with a sickening, visceral squelch.
That moment is, I think, supposed to convey the fragility of early human existence – one second you’re foraging, the next you’re impaled and/or imperiled – though I couldn’t help but think of the film’s own cursed journey. Shot all the way back in 2023, In the Blink of an Eye is just now arriving on Hulu about three years later after many delays – not unheard of in the relatively glacial world of movie production, though never a good sign, especially considering that Stanton is the creative force behind such sentimental juggernauts as Wall-E and Finding Nemo (as well as several other Pixar movies, plus John Carter). The protracted timeline suggested that it was either going to be tricky and ambitious, a hard-fought journey of space and time, or, more likely, a complete mess.
Proposal approved by Modi government will bring official English name into line with Malayalam language
The Indian state of Kerala, known as “God’s own country” for its golden beaches and lush tea plantations, is to be given a new name.
Narendra Modi’s cabinet has approved a proposal to change the southern coastal state’s name from Kerala to Keralam. The move will bring the official English name into line with how it is pronounced in Malayalam, the primary language spoken by the state’s estimated population of 35 million.
It was once reserved for office workers and Rishi Sunak, but now pop stars and supermodels can’t get enough of the preppy look
My favourite kind of fashion moment is not a Met Gala headline-maker or a Paris catwalk extravaganza. Nope. My favourite fashion moment is when one piece of clothing is suddenly everywhere for no obvious reason, which is what is happening right now with the quarter-zip sweater.
The jumper with a chin-to-breastbone zip, which has been around for ever, is the breakout main character of the 2026 wardrobe. At a Chanel catwalk show held in New York recently, a quarter-zip knit was the star of the show, worn with a fancy cocktail-hour skirt and diamond drop earrings. Charli xcx teamed a Saint Laurent one with sunglasses and shorts on her last trip to Paris fashion week. Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta wears stealth-wealth dark merino ones in the dugout, rapper Central Cee wears a cream Ralph Lauren one on TikTok – and the man opposite you on the train right now, taking a Zoom call on his AirPods while eating Pret porridge, is probably wearing one too.
Rovier Carrington thought his cases against MTV and Paramount executives should have been the biggest of the #MeToo era. Instead, they raised unsettling questions about victimhood
One unseasonably warm afternoon in February 2023, in a very brown New York City courtroom, Rovier Carrington did the inconceivable: he admitted to a lie. On that day, the aspiring screenwriter told a federal judge that he had altered evidence to support his legal claim of being systematically raped and blacklisted by a bevy of Hollywood powerbrokers.
Jamieson Greer warns tariffs may climb from 10% after Trump imposed global levy amid US supreme court setback
The US tariff rate for some countries will go up to 15% or higher from the newly imposed 10%, Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, said on Wednesday, without naming any specific trading partners or other details.
“Right now, we have the 10% tariff. It’ll go up to 15 [%] for some and then it may go higher for others, and I think it will be in line with the types of tariffs we’ve been seeing,” Greer said in an interview on Fox Business Network’s Mornings with Maria program.
Exclusive: Alvi Choudhury claiming damages against Thames Valley police after biased technology confused him with man looking ‘10 years younger’
Police arrested a man for a burglary in a city he had never visited after face scanning software deployed across the UK confused him with another person of south Asian heritage.
Alvi Choudhury, 26, a software engineer, was working at the home he shares with his parents in Southampton in January when police knocked on his door, handcuffed him and held him in custody for nearly 10 hours before releasing him at 2am.
The sounds of Afghan history are being erased to prevent music’s ‘moral corruption’ of the Afghan people. We can help keep Afghanistan’s music alive. Plus, Eliane Radigue’s deep listening, and the brilliance of Sinners’s score
The horrors of the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan are all-encompassing. New laws that effectively legalise domestic abuse means that every woman in the country now lives with the threat of state-sanctioned violence. In the context of the twin tragedies of the Taliban’s fundamentalist zealotry, and the rest of the world’s silence in the face of their atrocities, the fate of Afghanistan’s cultural life might seem a smaller catastrophe. Yet it’s equivalently devastating.
The recent burning of hundreds of musical instruments and equipment – reported last week on Afghan National Television – is the latest stage of the Taliban morality police’s ongoing mission to destroy all these artefacts. Last week’s pyre included tablas and harmoniums, instruments that are the bedrocks of Afghanistan’s unique tradition of classical music, as well as keyboards and amplifiers.
The newly crowned Olympic champions were warmly greeted by both Republicans and Democrats. They were also used as props by the president
During Tuesday’s State of the Union, Donald Trump welcomed members of the US men’s national hockey team to the House gallery to chants of “U-S-A, U-S-A!”. Trump revealed that Team USA’s goaltender, Connor Hellebuyck, will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “What special champions you are,” Trump told the players, who had beaten Canada on Sunday in the gold medal game of the Winter Olympics.
Judge allows Safe Passage International to launch judicial review of halting of right to bring in children and partners
The Home Office’s controversial decision to suspend the right of refugees to bring their children and partners to the UK is to face a legal challenge in the high court, the Guardian can disclose.
Safe Passage International, a charity working with unaccompanied children and refugees, has been granted permission to launch a judicial review of the decision to halt refugee family reunion after it claimed the suspension was unlawful.
Maiale al latte pairs tender pork with a creamy, caramelised sauce – and saves old milk from a down-the-sink fate
According to the Sustainable Food Trust, “the milk from 40,000 cows (300,000 tonnes) is tipped down the kitchen sink each year – a real slap in the face for the farmer”. Even though some supermarkets have now swapped use-by for best-before dates on their milk, those dates can still be confusing, so always do the sniff test before binning it: even if it’s a little sour, you can still cook with it.
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